


In Days To Come (The Kill Your Heroes Remix)

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestor-Era, Black Romance, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Red Romance, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 15:14:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In all of Alternian history there are a bare handful that welcome your arrival: rebels and fools and hopeless dreamers, the doomed and the damned. Beautiful, all of them, in their madness, in the way their smiles light the darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Days To Come (The Kill Your Heroes Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [В Грядущие Дни (In Days To Come by roachpatrol)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/946410) by [Mr_Scapegrace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mr_Scapegrace/pseuds/Mr_Scapegrace)
  * Inspired by [The Wise Man, Like the Fool](https://archiveofourown.org/works/282879) by [MacaroniSwirls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacaroniSwirls/pseuds/MacaroniSwirls). 



> _I say you kill your heroes and  
>  fly, fly, baby, don't cry.  
> Don't you worry, 'cause  
> everybody will die. _  
> \--AWOLNATION, 'Kill Your Heroes'

They cut him down, and he is dead. They burn his body, and he is dead. His followers descend like flies on a picked-clean corpse, they carry his shackles into legend and his words into their dreams and he is dead.

“ _I tried,_ ” his ghost whispers, a scratched and dusty record. “ _I tried, I tried, I tried._ ”

There is more to this story, and you are already so very tired of it.

*

The breeding caverns are pitch-black and reek of flesh, of sex and life and birth and secret trials. The girl who has tracked you down through them is awake far beyond her normal hours, has pursued you far beyond her duties, though strictly speaking you are down here somewhat outside of yours.

You stop, finally, and stare her down. Her face is pale in the light of your eyes.

“They say--” she bites her lip, scared, brave, scared. “You’re the Demoness, aren’t you, and they say that the Demoness will, at times, trade a secret for a kiss.”

“I’ve been known to,” you admit. You are sterile as the grave and yet the call of life is hard one not to heed, at times. And there’s nothing wrong with enjoying what little you are allotted, a pittance, here and there, of flesh. If there was, you would have been stopped. Your Master is very firm.

Your service is, if not easy, at the very least _straightforward._

She shifts from side to side, cups her elbows with her opposite hands.

“Do you have any secrets about me?”

“I might.”

She comes towards you, steady in the dimness, in the deadly rainbow shine of your eyes, and presses up on her toes. Her lips are cold against yours, and unsure.

“There,” she says, dropping back to her heels, and clasps her hands behind herself.

You lean down, take her chin, and you kiss her in exactly the way it is sacrosanct for a jadeblooded servant of the mother grub to be kissed at this point in time, you kindle her to the secrets of herself. She makes a soft startled noise against your tongue and fists the front placket of your dress, swaying into your embrace.

“You will walk with death all your life,” you whisper into her mouth, “and when you finally succumb it will be nothing more nor less than a relief.”

He breath is utterly ragged. “Thank you, ma’am,” she says, all propriety, and leans in again--

A meteor crashes through the cavern’s vault. Everything is heat and noise and confusion, and you hold her to yourself as molten stone rains down around you. She is thin as an untested sapling, in your arms, and she is already exactly as strong as she needs to be.

You leave her: you will meet again.

*

When he first meets you he is very small, three sweeps old and utterly innocent. He looks up at you and you could kill him now, leave a hole for the world to close up around, smooth and seamless. His lips shape a name that he shouldn’t possibly know: it is the name that you whispered to yourself in your cold bed in a cold mansion, that you breathed into the pillow as you twisted with nightmares as a wiggler yourself. It is the name that burned through your blood, raised you to fight and scream and rail against your fate because it was your name, yours, and you were no one’s.

It is the name your Master stole from you.

He has _no right--_

He flinches. He is already a hole in the world, and he has every right. You leave him before you can do anything you’ll regret more than necessary.

*

 

“You were there,” the girl says, hisses. Her blade is sharp against your throat. She’s not the first to try to kill the unkillable, but she’s come remarkably close. “What did he say, is it true that he never repented, is it true? Tell me, Death’s Daughter, at the very end, tell me what he screamed.”

“The same thing all of you scream, in one way or another,” you say. “He screamed _‘I don’t want to die._ And then he died.”

“No!” she shouts, and the blade nicks into your throat, spills rust-red down the high collar of your dress. “No, no, _no!_ You’re lying!”

“What does it matter, Neophyte?” you ask: tired, curious, tired of your curiosity. You reach into her shirt and draw out the symbol, the tiny toothless shackles. A torture device, redeemed into a silver-sparkling ideal. It is highblood-chilly against your fingertips and entirely obscene.

“Tell me, girl, what any of it matters. Tell me that now, dead, dead and dust, tell me that this man you never met could ever possibly mean anything.”

“He means everything,” she says. “You were there. You know. You can’t tell me you don’t.”

You kiss her, tongue to tongue until her grief transmutes to fury which transmutes to an iron-hard _purpose._ She will be a good tool, a good pawn, one of your best. She will set so much in motion in her brief little life. You strip her bare and begging by the end of the day, but you let her keep that pendant on.

*

His lover growls at you, when you find him again. She has an animal’s distrust of the supernatural, and when you visit her in her cold and lonely cave she will throw a heavy pot of paint at your head and you will allow it to connect. You still bear the small scratch across one of your horns: a paltry atonement, compared to her sweeps of grief.

“It’s okay, I know her,” the Signless reassures his Disciple, and she settles back down against the carcass of the prey beast they have felled together. Her mouth runs red with animal blood.

“Tell me a story, Signless,” you say. “Tell me one of your stories.”

The man hums thoughtfully. He’s grown into himself, his shoulders broad and his chin strong his wary stare leveled into something hotly compassionate. He is still small, but he is stalwart.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl and she had lots of friends who loved her very much,” he says. “She liked archaeology, she would say, because it was a way to see through time. She got all her dresses dirty and talked to the sleepy old ghosts she dug up and stayed out all day getting blisters over potshards. One night she played a game with her friends and she did the best she could and it wasn’t enough, none of it was enough, though they were all good, and strong, and they tried. With her last breath she reached out and took the hand of a little boy with mutant blood and she promised that they would all, eventually, be okay.”

“That was never me,” you say. You want to be very clear on this point.

He only smiles. His hands are bucher’s bloody up to the elbows. “Didn’t say it was, Demoness. Are you staying for lunch?”

“No,” the Disciple says.

“No,” you agree.

“Once upon a time there was a cat who skipped too many meals,” the Signless said. “She got really cranky and her best friend sent her back to camp to think very hard about being rude to strangers.”

The Disciple hisses, sulkily. You can still feel the sharp ache as heavy crockery smashes across your horn. It was the least you owed her. It was the least you owe any of them.

“Tell me,” you say. “What do you really hope to accomplish, with these dreams of yours? What do you imagine, Signless, lies at the end of the path the two of us have drawn together?”

He only laughs, like you’ve had this argument before. “You told me my dreams were true,” he says, confidingly. “I believed in you long enough to start believing in myself. You can’t stop me now with a little bit of Devil’s Advocacy.”

His hands are steady on the knife. He has bothered to close the eyelids of the creature he and his friend have killed. You don’t know its name: the names of the living change even more rarely than their forms, and are utterly irrelevant to your purposes.

“In another world you follow your dreams,” he says. He’s quoting. “In this one you get people to help you accomplish them. Maybe I think I can do both! What do you dream of, Demoness?”

“Nothing at all,” you say.

You leave them to their dinner.

*

He is young, all gangly joints and greasy shortclipped hair, brilliant and clever and when he sees you this early in his life he only laughs, a splintered leg broken off the chair of despair, and he says “I’ll put in a second noodle pack, then.”

He also says, “You’re hotter than I thought you’d be,” and takes the empty bowl from your fingers, and kisses you right on the nose. His eyes are fever bright and his smile is all manic self-aware insanity, he’s being ridiculous and knows it.

Not many people greet the face of doom like she’s a friend they’ve been missing, and you kiss his long pointy nose back. He smiles and smiles at you. It feels absurd, but nice.

You sit on the foot of his bunk and let him kiss you, your mouth, over and over like he’s daring you to stop him and hopes you don’t, and he is lovely, this early in his life, and he is so kind and so stupid. When you brush his bangs out of his feverish two-toned eyes he breathes in through his nose, like you’ve hurt him, and starts to cry.

“They’re shipping me out in the morning,” he says, like a confession, like you don’t already know, and the thin lovely curve of his neck is writ taut with fear and shame. “Oh god, oh god, they’re shipping me out, please, lady, madam, Demoness, your _Worship_ , tell me you’re here to bring me my death before they do.”

“No,” you say, and curls his head into the useless circle of his arms.

You take his face in your hands, his whole life. It will be long, and hard, and he will never thank you for what you are about to say, which is:

“I know somebody.”

He laughs, desperate and bitter, and his tongue brushes wetly against your thumb. “I’d say you get to know everybody, sooner or later. My pretty Psychopomp, what does it fucking matter to me?”

You wet your fingers with his golden tears. He quivers a little, and you draw a symbol across his chest -- damp and nearly invisible -- that he won’t recognize for a dozen sweeps.

“Everything,” you say, “for those with eyes to see.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, shut up and give me my last rights, Corpsefucker,” he says savagely, rolls you over. His hips are harsh against yours as he grinds down, trying to drown himself in your morbid distraction, the transient pleasures of the flesh. He’s not your favorite pawn but he is so very lovely, and he kisses you like he cares. But you’ve plucked a raw cord, sounded out some terrible sour note of hope from his scared and childish heart. He will run, after you leave him, throw his life down the path you have marked out for him and one way or another he will find his way to where he must go.

When he sees you again you will kneel down at his side at the campfire, and he will put another pod of noodles in the soup for you. When you see him first he will be dazed with pain and flayed down to his elbows and he will scream “He loved you, you filthy traitorous whore, he loved you,” and you will not have had the faintest idea of what he was talking about.

*

The boy is young but already over-muscled, his body straining its boundaries, his temper straining still further. His pride has strained too far and burst to shreds beneath your nails. He has thought he could call you, confine you, command you.

He is a fool. The remnants of the cage lie in pools at your feet, redhot and steaming, and he kneels before you sheened with perspiration. His hands are very large and very wet in yours, and his face is a drawn mask of anguish and resentment.

You snap his smallest finger. He is very highcaste; he goes pale gray, but makes not a sound.

“Why would you do this?” you ask. Your voice is a whipcrack. “Why would you seek to bind death?”

He does not reply. You snap his next finger.

“Answer me!” you demand.

“I saw you once, your-- your _Highness,_ ” he grits out. “I called your name but you did not answer--”

You snap another finger.

“If you had only done as I had desired I would not have had to force you!” he screams.

You crush his thumbs. “You don’t understand the nature of desire,” you say.

He is weeping; his blue tears splash coldly against your joined hands, and when you try to pull back he clutches at you with fingers that twist half the wrong way.

“You are so beautiful,” he cries. “You are so beautiful and so sad, Demoness, and I only wanted to talk to you-- to tell you that I would be yours--”

You break the last of his fingers, then close your mouth over his.

“Oh,” he breathes, “please--”

You take him, hard and unforgiving, fuck him raw and desperate across the floor until he is a ragged smear of burns and bruises. You take him to pieces and build something rather more to your liking with what remains. He will never love anyone but you, all his long and terrible life, and then you leave him to his fate.

He is nowhere near your favorite pawn, and his hands will always be as weak as his spirit.

*

Your dreamer walks into a tealblood village: a trap, set and waiting, and the armies of the Condesce mass eagerly against him. And then there is you, pinned to this point in time, between the living and the dead, and your wands are in your hands. His eyes are so terribly wide, red as rubies, red as his impossible blood, and he beholds you not as death incarnate but as something very fine and beautiful. He looks as if he loves you, as if he has just realized he loves you. His lips shape a soft, surprised O, but he does not look away.

He would die here, this is why he didn’t, you are the reason for him and he is the reason for you.

You know this now.

You level your white wands, and call all the terrible rainbow fire of your purpose up into them.

*

You find her sleeping in a tavernhive eighty sweeps away from where she so desperately wants to be, and you sit down beside her as everyone scrambles out the door. She just looks up at you, gestures to an empty stool.

“Handmaid,” she says. Sways up over the counter, pulls out a bottle for you. You have met before: you will meet again.

You incline your head, and snap the top of the bottle off.

She talks and she drinks and she leans against you, old friend that she is, fortune’s favorite daughter: deathdealir, liferuiner, survivor. She is not precisely your favorite pawn but she serves her purpose, and that earns her the presumption to wrap rope-roughened fingers around your waist, to pull you on to her lap and wash whisky fumes across your breasts. She sucks hot marks into your throat and her teeth are far too rough. But you allow it. She is not your favorite but she is owed much more than you can give her.

“Will I ever find him?” she asks. “‘M so tired, ‘Maid, I’m so _fucking_ tired.”

She’s sloppy drunk: debased, debauched, despairing. You have not even gotten your mouth wet.

Your hands are perfectly level, and you dip two fingers into her shotglass.

“Have faith, Spinerette,” you say, and you trace with clear spirits two interlocked circles across her palm. “You have roads left within you.”

When she looks up at you, her eyes are glassy with lust and alcohol and the poisonous illusions of her future. You can see clear through them to the battlefields, the careless corpseheaps of her temporal wake, building already. You see her death and the death of all that she has ever dared to love. You have already been there, and seen the Summoner’s great sweeping horns drop in surrender.

She kisses you, all hope and hunger, all mortality. You kiss her back.

*

You go back, farther than you’ve ever been, and stand on the shore of a young and laughing ocean. The moons hang small in the sky, tiny as pearls, and the stars blaze forth.  
There is a small girl in the surf, a wiggler, barely six sweeps. Her hair is a dark tangle and her eyes, when she sees you approach, are bright with curiosity.

“Hello,” she says. “Who are you?”

This far back, no one knows you.

“I’m the Handmaid,” you say.

“Do you want to be friends?”

“No.”

“Oh, posh, everyone wants friends,” she says, and pats the sand. “Lie down, Handmaid. I’m watching the stars.”

You lie down. The dampness of the ocean seeps up into you. She points one slender arm, extends one soft little finger.

“That one’s the Music Box,” she says. “I’m making up constellations, I can’t find the ones in the scrolls, I think I’ve been lied to. That one’s the Ship. That one’s the Octopus.”

She points again. “That one’s the Handmaid,” she says, and laughs.

And so it is. You have seen the charts yourself, learned them as a wiggler in a cold green mansion from a cold green book.

“What does a Handmaid do?” the girl asks.

“Whatever is necessary.”

She nods, uncomprehending. “That doesn’t sound much fun.”

“It isn’t.”

“So quit,” she says. Just like that. _So quit._

“I can’t.”

“My mom says you can do whatever you want, if you put your mind to it.” She raises her arms to the sky, gives a sandy full-body wriggle. “For instance, I am going to go to the stars. I am going to go see each and every one of them! What are you going to to?”

“Whatever I must.”

“You’re boring,” she says. She rolls over, onto her elbows. “You’re weird and you’re boring. No wonder we’re not friends!”

You sit up. You are very angry, and you are not sure why.

“Let me tell you something, Empress,” you say. “Space and Time are not your friends either. Every star out there is thousands of lightyears away from where you are sitting right now and they are all, each and every one of them, dead and dying. You are seeing nothing more than a trick played upon you by the universe itself: the false illumination of dead stars, like ghosts pinned to a board and made to scream long after their sundering. By the time you reached half those stars they would be nothing more than burnt-out holes in the fabric of the universe.”

“I’ll see the ones that are still shining,” she says stubbornly, though her thin shoulders bow inwards and her head hangs troubled. “As many as I can! As many as there are. There’s more to life than sitting around on a stupid beach, and I’m going to go see it all.”

You laugh. It feels strange in your throat, painful. “There’s more to life indeed, Empress. There’s death.”

For the first and only time she looks scared. “I don’t like you,” she says, and shoves at you with small delicate hands. “I don’t like you, Handmaid, go away.”

You kiss her, her small face, her snarling lips, and you dare to pat her on the head between her stubby little horns. You leave her with a spark of dazed and wondering hatred, burning inside her, you leave her with an aching hole in her heart that she will never be able to fill.

The first time you saw her she was standing on a dais, looking down, and your lips ran red with mutant blood. Her eyes were like empty pits, cold and hungry, and she had already drunk down the light of a dozen star systems: you had looked at her and saw your death and it had made you so very glad.

Hers will be the last lips you’ll ever kiss. She isn’t your favorite pawn but she’ll reach the end of the board regardless, and you hope the weight of all her crowns breaks her slender, beautiful neck.

*

You skip forward, so far forward, nearly as far as it is possible to go. You are so tired of old things, and everything in the whole chewed-up universe is old.

“Are you death?” he asks. “Is that why you’re here?” He is three sweeps old and far from home, lost and exhausted and the sickle he levels at you barely crests your hips. When did you ever grow so tall, so impossibly vast? Your head is very heavy, and you are at least as exhausted as he, vulnerable tender little morsel that he is, here in the gathering dawn, swaying on his tiny feet. He is such a fragile slip of something new, a bright fresh spark, and you could cup your hands around him till he smothers.

“No,” you say. “I just work for him.” You hold out his hand. “I’m here to guide you home, Karkat.”

*

In all of Alternian history there are a bare handful that welcome your arrival: rebels and fools and hopeless dreamers, the doomed and the damned. Beautiful, all of them, in their madness, in the way their smiles light the darkness.

“Hey,” the Signless says, and, stumbles to an inelegant halt. His arms are full of maps and his head is full of lies and dreams, but he shuffles them all to one side to come and greet you, to take your arm and to pat your shoulder. It burns through you pale as starlight, and he smiles so wide and bright, scared and and made sacrosanct with his bravery. He loves you: you have done nothing to earn it but he loves you, nonetheless. He is your favorite pawn and you will sacrifice him before all the terrible world without hesitation when the time comes. You already have. Your remorse is a paltry offering to his ashes, your grief irrelevant, irreverent.

“Thank you, Demoness,” he says. The smell of his burning flesh hangs heavy in your heart, the sound of his screams as you betray him.

It is almost time for both your endings.


End file.
